Spaces, difficulties, and encounters for a sociology from the interstices. A conversation with Luis Enrique Alonso

Abstract

The text includes selected excerpts from an interview with Luis Enrique Alonso, one of the leading figures in Spanish critical sociology. In addition to providing a retrospective overview of his personal and intellectual career, the interview addresses his main influences and connections, reflects on the processes of institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline in post-Franco Spain and on the gaps and difficulties that arose for the development of critical sociology; considers the various traditions within this process of institutionalization of the critical gaze and the differences between the structure of opportunities for criticism in the 1980s and at the present time. The central role played in critical sociology by the experience of the postgraduate course “Praxis of the Sociology of Consumption” is addressed, also revealing its internal differences, the importance of a tremendously honest form of professionalization, and the development of a non-academic sociology. The text goes on to consider the growing distance between a context increasingly in need of critical research and the multiplication of obstacles to its development, both due to the acceleration of sociological activity and the neoliberal forms in which it operates, and due to what the author calls “technolatry” and the closure of the symbolic universe of technocracy. In this tension, Luis Enrique Alonso advocates a necessary alliance with activism and the intersection between the public and the common. He concludes forcefully with a broad defense of the necessary embedding of sociological activity in real social processes, based on a self-critical assumption of his own position.